Indigenous Knowledge and Pedagogy for Indigenous Children

• Main Authors: Navin Kumar Singh, Jon Reyhner
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Arctic
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.411.8397; http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jar/HOC/HOC-4.pdf

Globally educational systems have failed Indigenous students in regards to both respecting their human rights, including providing academic success, and as a result, Indigenous students around the world have demonstrated a lack of academic achievement and enthusiasm for schooling in its conventional colonial form. The United Nations General Assembly’s adoption in 2007 of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples brought new attention to this failure. This chapter provides a review of literature indicating how validating and utilizing Indigenous knowledge and pedagogy in schools can improve the education of Indigenous children and illustrative examples of how the United States and India have provided some support for the Indigenous educational rights now recognized by the United Nations. Indigenous Knowledge (IK) can be described as wisdom needed to survive in a particular environment—be it successfully hunting seals in the frigid Canadian arctic or growing maize in the desert southwestern United States—and knowledge